CogBlog

Coghead@Work for the Alameda Housing Authority

by Paul Salazar

Ron Dion is not your typical software developer. As a line manager at a public agency, Ron wanted to improve the way that the Housing Authority of the County of Alameda (California) could serve its constituents through an online web application. He considered several ways to meet the need including Salesforce.com and other web-based form builders. He wanted the flexibility to build the application himself. As the line manager, he knew his problem better than anyone else and simply needed the toolkit to turn his idea into reality. He found Coghead to be the right answer.

“Coghead wasn’t just the difference between creating my app directly myself or doing it by remote control through IT.  It was the difference between getting it done and launching it instead of watching the grass grow while it percolated high enough for IT to attack.”

The Housing Authority is a part of a greater network of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funded organizations around the United States which provide benefits at the county local level. Ron needed to set up an online Benefits Application form for residents of Alameda County and also a data management back end for implementing his business process once applications were submitted. For such an application, Ron found Coglets to be key, allowing many users to submit and manage their information over the web without skyrocketing his per-user costs. He also found the functionality met his business requirements well. “I tried to do it first with Salesforce. I failed. Coglets allowed me to succeed.”

Coghead@Work for Web Force Express

by Paul Salazar

Web Force Express is a new company founded by Leonid Blaivas. Leonid was an early adopter of Coghead and has been helpful to the development team at Coghead with his many discussions on the Coghead Forums and his work developing applications for some of Coghead’s earliest customers. While growing his expertise on Coghead, Leonid saw the opportunity to create an entirely new business and opened Web Force Express this year to devote his full time to creating and deploying solutions on the Coghead platform as a Coghead Charter Affiliate.

One of Leonid’s early customers is Morrison Express, a leading international freight forwarder and logistics services provider. They are using Coghead for a comprehensive CRM system to enable the sales team to effectively track leads, opportunities, contacts and activities within accounts. The system provides management visibility into the sales pipeline and enhances the productivity of the sales team. The application expands upon the functionality typically found in enterprise systems such as SalesForce.com or SugarCRM with customizations for the logistics and transportation industry. The customizations increase Morrison Express’s agility, facilitate prospecting of future customers, and provide for enhanced customer satisfaction. According to Paul Fu, vice president of corporate development and CIO of Morrison Express, “We need applications that work the way we work, not the way a software vendor thinks we should work. Packaged software often ends up delivering more than we need in some areas and less than we want in others.” 

Another Web Force Express customer is Newstar Fresh Foods, a leading grower, shipper and processor of superior quality produce. Leonid designed a database and configurator for food products at Newstar, a system which relates item codes, vendor names, packaging IDs and raw product codes into a comprehensive structure which enables the sales and management team to manage inventory and shipment of food products. Coghead is well suited to such scenarios because new data collections can be quickly and easily linked without impacting the production product or existing data integrity.

Coghead@Work for the York Group

by Paul Salazar

A common use case for Coghead is to connect employees who are geographically dispersed but need real-time access to information as it is created. These companies need to share customer data, project status, or documents that are essential to the operation of the business but are not easily shared and managed using more typical methods such as email.

The York Group is a global consulting group focused on marketing strategy consulting. Their consultants are based in 25 countries and need to share information on customer pipeline and on customer projects. They need to store and share documents linked to specific projects. They have developed an application on Coghead because their needs are a great fit for Coghead. The application includes multiple collections which relate consultant to pipeline data and consultant to project information. The consultants do not need to load new software on their systems to use Coghead, and they can access their data and shared project data from anyplace at anytime.

Coghead@Work for Digital Bridge Academy

by Paul Salazar

Our developers start using Coghead for many different reasons, including supporting non-profit businesses.   Non-profits frequently cannot afford the expense and maintenance overhead of complex business applications, yet they need them to be more effective at running their business. One such developer is Christopher Shockey.

Chistopher Shockey has been an active Coghead developer, opening trial accounts, posting in the Coghead Support Forum, asking for help on Live Chat, and talking with our Application Engineers. Why? He wants to work with educational institutions across the United States to use Coghead for a range of information processing needs. In particular, Christopher has been working with the Digital Bridge Academy to support their efforts to bring at-risk youth to colleges in a supportive environment to reach their educational goals.

Coghead@Work

by Paul Salazar

How are people using Coghead at work? We see a very broad range of uses for Coghead among our customers and Affiliates. One of the more common situations where developers turn to Coghead are for business applications that need to coordinate amongst a geographically distributed work force. Webware applications are simple to access at any time from any place, something which has been an extremely challenging task for businesses with installed software applications on laptops and desktops that are spread around the world (or even just across a building!)

Recently I was working with one of our customers who is coordinating a small group of consultants based in three different parts of the United States. The customer needed to:

• Manage travel to client sites
• Develop and store proposals for each client
• Manage the workflow of client sessions, including pre and post visit sessions.
• Trigger emails to initiate subsequent steps in the process flow

The customer custom built this functionality and now wants to add a dashboard so she can get a simple visual update for the progress in a given client project.  She is having trouble extending the custom solution to accommodate this need, and now one of our Coghead Application Engineers is working with her to get her application migrated, and add the  dashboard functionality.

If you are developing an application and need some assistance, reach out to us at Coghead and ask for help. We have an active Forum in which you might find a post from someone who encountered the same issue and has shared a good idea how to get past it, or you can post your own topic and work with others toward a solution. If you are well on your way building Coghead applications, consider how you can share your work as an Affiliate.

I’d be delighted to hear more about how you are using Coghead. Please let me know by sending a note to info@coghead.com.